Yes, you can make money off your Flickr photos (I recently had an art director contact me about some shots I took in Hawai'i last year). Which makes this post even more relevant.

The fact is, the price of commercial photography will be approaching zero in the near future. Deal with it. The deer now have guns. An experienced amateur is on almost the same level as the seasoned pro when it comes to marketing opportunities for their pictures.

Photographers need to get into the ammunition business, and soon.

I don't blog about political or religious stuff here, and I don't blog about business stuff in my personal blog.

Why?

Well, business is still business. I don't really care who my co-workers vote for, as long as they do their job well and maintain a good work environment. There is a reason, after all, why you don't talk about politics, religion and sex in polite conversation.

Things like John Gruber suddenly professing his man-crush on Bill Clinton un-nerve me. I like John's blog and think he's hella-smart, but smart people can and do disagree over non-controversial topics, so why throw out a topic like politics to antagonize things? Would he do that in a client meeting? So why do it on your blog?

Look, sometimes you can be a little *too* transparent in your blog. A blog, to quote graphpaper.com, is "intellectual prototyping", and like all good factories, a blog should be dedicated to making one type of thing alone. While it's true that the factories that once-produced typewriters were converted to churn out rifles during World War Two, they didn't try to make firearms and business equipment at the same time.

Know your limits: Just 'cause you can pass yourself off as an expert in one thing doesn't mean you're an expert at everything. We rightly mock celebrities who picture themselves as experts on climatology or international peace, let's not be too eager to throw ourselves onto the same bully pulpit.

Via Strobist is this fascinating blog done by an anonymous photo editor at a national magazine.

Great, great stuff here for the working pro, especially this tidbit:

"Die, die, die you lousy repositories of crappy photography.

istockphoto.com

us.fotolia.com

www.shutterstock.com

Make room for FREE stock photos.

100 Legal Sources for Free stock photos.

For sure, it’s a bad time to be a professional photographer who makes lousy cliché imagery. It’s even worse, if your entire business model revolves around using very expensive equipment to make crappy photos. The writing is on the wall."

Note: This is a *photo editor* extolling the virtues of free stock photography. Why? Not because he's out to get the professional photographer, not because he's into the latest Web 2.0 "wisdom of crowds" stuff, but because he's got deadlines and budgets to meet, and if he can save a few grand by going with a free image, he will.

Add this blog to your bookmarks and read it often if you want to learn how to get inside an editor's head.

Okay, so this post was about digital music and how prices are falling because of plain old economics.

And photographers need to pay attention here. Consider this paragraph from the story I linked:

"The price of music will likely not fall in the near term to absolutely zero. Charging any price at all requires the use of credit cards and their minimum fees of $0.20 or more per transaction, for example. And services like iTunes and Amazon can continue to charge something for quality of service. With P2P networks you don’t really know what you are getting until you download it. It could, for example, be a virus. Or a poor quality copy. Many users will be willing to pay to avoid those hassles. But as long as BitTorrent exists, or simple music search engines like Skreemrallow users to find and download virtually any song in seconds, they won’t be able to charge much."

Let's re-write it for the commercial photographer:

"The price of a photo will likely not fall in the near term to absolutely zero. Charging any price at all requires the use of credit cards and their minimum fees of $0.20 or more per transaction, for example. And services like iStockphoto can continue to charge something for quality of service. With sxc.hu and other free photo sites you don’t really know what issues may lay ahead. It could, for example, be a stolen image. Or have an unreleased model in the photo. Many users will be willing to pay to avoid those hassles. But as long as Flickr exists, or simple photo search engines like Google allow users to find and download virtually any photo in seconds, they won’t be able to charge much."

Can your business model deal with that harsh reality? If it doesn't, it needs to, and fast.

"Zero marginal cost + competition (anyone can create a copy of a song) results in a zero price, unless government creates artificial barriers to a free market."

- TechCrunch's Michael Arrington on digital music distribution

And get better pictures.

I have two fast zooms now and I love 'em, but I started with prime focus lenses first (mmm, 35mm f2) so I know when to change focal length and when not to.

And I agree that the good ol' 50mm is a highly underused and underrated lens.